>>from around the globe. >>It's the Cube with coverage >>of Coop con and cloud, Native con Europe 2020 Virtual brought to you by Red Hat, The Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back. I'm stew minimum. And this is the Cube's coverage of cube con cloud, native con Europe 2020 of course, happening virtual this year. We always love when we get to talk to the practitioners in this community. So much happening in the developer space and really excited to have on the program first time guest in a very timely topic, we welcome our bod. Hassani, Who is the back and lead for house? My flattening, which is a joint research project. It related to code 19 associated with the University of Toronto. About thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. >>All right, so maybe explain how is my flattening? You know, the term flattening the curve is something that I think everyone around the globe is familiar with. Now, um, you know, Canada, you've got some great initiatives going. So help us understand how you got involved in this in what? What is the project? Sure, So I'll >>take a stock to March, which now feels like years ago. Um, back in March, way could look across in Europe, and we saw that. You know, I feel we're being overwhelmed. This new Cobra thing was happening, and there seems to be nothing happening here despite the fact that we know what was going on in Europe. So this whole collaboration started. It's really the brainchild of Dr Ben. Fine. Who's the radiologist that actually and partners on the idea was, Why don't we put all the data that is related to co bid, uh, for the province of Ontario, where I'm from in one place, right. So for the data mining people, like a lot of people on the on the program here and for the data minded people of Ontario to be able to have the information they need to make targeted both of the general public on that policy makers to really empower them with the right tools. We know the data was siloed in health care, and we know, you know, when this whole thing started, everything was on a website, you would get a daily update, but it wasn't something that you could analyze. Something you couldn't use. Really? It was unusable. How everything kind of started it. What if we did something about that? What if we brought all the data in one place? What if we visualize it and put all the resources in place that was released? How is my fattening got a Which is this initiative that I got involved with back in March and what we've been doing is building a number of dashboards based on Kobe data that are close to real time as possible. Doing a number of analyses. Um, the answer, your specific questions and doing deep dives into specific question. We have a team of scientific experts where our leadership, um you know Dr Ben Fine. I mentioned earlier. There's Dr Laura Rosello, the epidemiologists out of Ah, Perceptron. Oh, and then we have a Dr Alley that he's Austin Oy. Who the data science lead over it. Quick. Also, we got this kind of three perfect or the organization of the right talent required, and we've been trying Yeah, and whatever way we can by making the data transparent, >>Yeah, there's been a lot of initiatives, obviously that have had to accelerate really fast during this time it bring us inside a little bit. How long did it take to spend the site up? How do you make sure you're getting good data in Who decides? You know which visualizations love to hear a little bit about? You know how that has matured over the months that you've had project out there >>for sure. So when we started what people were doing out on Twitter, really, where there's a lot of this activity was happening was people were grabbing expect sheets and typing out every day what was happening. And I mean, coming from I'm not by any means a technical developer. That's not what I specialize in, but having some development dot com, and it makes sense that things could be done so much better. So we started to build data pipelines. Starting in March. We had a couple of government sources that were public. It was basically scrapping the government website and recording that in a database. Um, and then we start to visualize that we're using, you know, whatever we could that we started with Pablo just because we had a few. We're trying to build a community, right? So a community people want help and do this. But we have some tableau experts on our team and our community and, you know, the way we went. So we had the database. We started to connect with tableau and visualize it. Do you know, besides into and also that and then the project has matured from that web stopper ever since, with more complex data, pipeline building and data from different sources and visualizing them in different ways and expanding our dash boarding and expanding our now >>well in the cube con show that we're here at is so much about community. Obviously, open source is a major driver of what's going on there. So it sounded like that was that was a big piece of what you're working on. Help us bring inside out of that community build. I'd love to hear if there's any projects and tools you mentioned tableau for visualization, but anything from open source also that you're using. >>So actually, I I've never been involved in open source project before That this was kind of my first attempt, if you will, on we started, uh, on get hub quite early on. Actually, one of the partners I got involved in re shots was was Red hat off course. They're known for doing open source and for selling at it, and we have some amazing help from them into how we can organize community. Um, and we started to move the community over from getting up to get lab. You know, we started to the way we collaborate in slack. Ah, lot of times. And there's a lot of silos that we started to break those down and move them into get lab. And all conversations were happening in public that would beam or more closer to an open source approach. And honestly, a lot of people that are involved are our students, grass students who want to help our people in the community that want to help people from all kind of different backgrounds. I think we're really bringing in open source is not not a known concept in a lot of these clinical scientific communities, right? It's a lot more developer oriented, and I think it's been it's been learning opportunity for everyone involved. Uh, you know, something that may seem kind of default or basic have been a big learning opportunity for everyone of, you know, issues shocking and labeling and using comments and I'll going back into our own old ways of like, emailing people are people. Um, they had been digital art to it, and we'll get a lot of the big one. Um, we went from having this kind of monolithic container rising it and using Kubernetes, of course, were developed with the help of Red Hat. We're able to move everything over to their open shift dedicated platform, and that was that allowed us to do is really do a lot of do things a lot better and do things in a more mature way. Um, that's that's quite a bit of information, but that's kind of high level. What it? >>Well, no, it's great. We One of the things we've been poking out for the last few years is you know, in the early days you talk about kubernetes. It was Oh, I need things at a scale on And, you know, while I'm sure that the amount of data and scale is important, speed was a major major piece of what you need to be involved in and you'll be able to rally and James So can you talk a little bit more. Just open shift. What did that bring to the environment? Any aspects related to the data that red hat help you with. >>So a few things there. The one thing that open shift I think really helped us with was really mean and how to help us with generally was establishing a proper see I CD pipeline. Right. So now we we use git lab itself. We have get lab runners that everyone, basically all developers involved have their own branches when they push code to get auto. We like to their branch. It just made everything a lot easier and a lot faster to be able to push things quickly without worrying about everything breaking That was definitely a big plus. Um, the other thing that we're doing with, uh that is using containers. Actually, we've been working on this open data hub, which is, you know, working on another great open source project which is again built on kubernetes and trying to break down some of the barriers when it comes to sharing data in the healthcare system. Um, we're using that and we, with the help of red, how we're able to deploy that to be able to collaborate between hospitals, share data securely. You do security analytics and try to break down some of these silos that I've gone up due to fears over security and find the so That's another great example open source helping us kind of pushing forward. >>Well, that that's I'm glad you brought that up The open data hub, that collaboration with other places when you have data being able to share that, you know, has to be important talk. This was a collaboration to start with, you know, what's the value of being able to work with other groups and to share your data beyond beyond just the community that's working on it. >>So if you think about what's happening right now in a lot of hospitals in Canada, and I mean it's the same in the US is everyone is in this re opening stage. We shut down the economy. We should down a lot of elective surgeries and a lot of procedures. I know hospitals are trying to reopen right so and trying to figure out how to go back to their old capacity, and in that they're all trying to solve the same problem in different ways. So everyone is in their silo trying to tackle the same problems in a way. So what we're trying to do is basically get everyone together and collaborate on this open, open source environments, right? And what this open data allows us to do in to some degree alleviate some of the fears over sharing data so that we're not all doing the same thing in parallel are not talking to each other. We're able to share code, share data, get each other's opinions and, you know, use your resources in the healthcare system or official the drill, you know, all trying to address the same goal here. >>So imagine if you've had a lot of learnings from this project that you've done. Have you given any thought to? You know, once you get past that kind of the immediate hurdle of covert 19 you know what? Will this technology be able to help you going forward? You know, what do you see? Kind of post dynamic, if you will. >>I think the last piece I touched on, there is a big thing that I'm really hoping we'll be able to push forward past the pandemic. I think what? What the pandemic has shown us is the need for more transparency and more collaboration and being able to be more agile in response to things faster. And that's know how they're operating. And I think we know that now we can see that. I'm hoping that can be used as an opportunity to be able to bring people together to collaborate on projects like, How's my funding outside of this, right? We're not Not only the next pandemic. Hopefully I never come. Um but but for other, bigger problem that we face every day, collaboration can only help things, not tender thing. I'm hoping that's one big side effect that comes out of this. And I think the data transparency thing is is another big one that I'm hoping can improve outside of the situation. >>Yeah, I I wonder if I can ask you just a personal question. We've heard certain organizations say that, you know, years of planning have been executed in months. When I think about all the technologies that you had thrown at you, all the new things you learned often that something that would have taken years. But you didn't month. So how do you work through that? You know, there's only 24 hours in any day, and we do need some sleep. So what was important from your standpoint? What partners into tools helped, you know, and And the team, you know, take advantage of all of these new technologies. >>Yeah, honestly, I think that the team is really, really important. We've had an amazing set of people that are quite diverse and then usually would, quite honestly, never be seen in the same room together just because of all the different backgrounds that are there. Um, so that was a big driver. I think everyone was motivated to get things done. What happens when we first launched the site? We, you know, put it together. Basic feedback mechanism. Where we where we could hear from the public on. We've got an outpouring of support, people saying that they found that information really useful. And I think that pushed everyone to work harder and ah, and kind of reinforces our belief that this is what we're doing is helpful on, is making a difference in someone's life. And I think everyone that helped everyone work harder in terms of some of the tools that we use. Yeah, I totally agree. I think there was a 1,000,000 things that we all learned. Um, and it definitely wasn't amazing. Growing opportunity, I think, for the whole group. Um, I I don't know if there's a There's any wisdom I can impart. They're more than I think we were just being pushed by the need and being driven by the support that we're getting. Okay, >>well, you know, when there's a necessity to get things done, it's great to see the team execute the last question I have for you. You've got all this data. You've got visualizations. You've been going through a lot of things any any interesting learnings that you had or something that you were. You able to visualize things in a certain way in the community, reacted anything that you've learned along the way. That may be surprised you. >>That's a really interesting question there. I think the biggest, the biggest learning opportunity or surprise for me was what? How much people are willing to help if you just write, um, a lot of people involved. I mean, this is a huge group of volunteers who are dedicating their time to this because they believe in it on because they think they're doing the right thing and they're doing it for a bigger cause. It sounds very cheesy. Um, but I think that was wonderful to me to see that we can bring together such diverse people to dedicate their time for freedom to do something for the public. >>Yeah, well, and along that note, I I see on the website there is a get involved. But so is there anything you know, skill set or people that you're looking for, uh, further to help the team >>100%. So I think when I every time we do a presentation of any thought really got for anyone who's watching to just go on our site and get involved, there's a 1,000,000 different things that you can get involved with. If you're a developer, we can always use help. If you're a data, this person, we can always use help If you're a designer, honestly, there were a community driven organization. Uhm and we can always use more people in that community. That's that's the unique thing about the organization. 100%. Please do to house my finding, Dr and you get involved in get Lab. >>Well, so far, but thank you so much for sharing. We definitely encourage the unity get involved. It's projects like this that are so critically important. Especially right now during the pandemic. Thanks so much for joining. And thank you for all the work the team did. >>Thank you for having me. >>Alright. And stay tuned for more coverage from Cube Con Cloud native on 2020 in Europe Virtual Edition. I'm Stew Minimum. And thank you for watching the Cube. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah